Article excerpt

On 9 November, Hans-Ulrich Treichel was at the dentist's. His
schedule records a seminar on German writer Gottfried Benn the next
morning at the Freie Universitt Berlin (Free University of Berlin),
and he has no doubt that it did actually take place. Work to rule.
Without his schedule, Treichel would not remember such minor points.
When Marcel Beyer recalls that date, he thinks of the "first car he
ever owned". Ulrike Draesner was in Munich doing her dissertation
and only realized that the Wall had fallen when the first Trabi
drove into the city. Katja Lange-Mller, who moved from East to West
Berlin in 1984, was on a reading tour and spent the evening in a
hotel in the West German city of Bochum unaware of events. Most
German writers, at least those in the West, somehow missed the
German "night of nights". The 9 November took place without them. At
least that is what can be deduced from the anthology Die Nacht, in
der die Mauer fiel, (The Night the Wall Fell) which brings together
writers' recollections of that auspicious day.

By contrast, the young East German writers were either completing
their military service with the National People's Army, like Jochen
Schmidt, Uwe Tellkamp or Andre Kubiczek, and therefore could not be
"wall-dancers" at that historic moment. The mood was rather
ambivalent among their comrades of the same age. The fall of the
Wall brought to an end a phase of revolutionary elan, during which
the participants believed they were subjects of history. To their
own astonishment, they realized that they could actually have an
effect, but scarcely had they realized this, when it was already
over. For those born later, the stories about the fall of the Berlin
Wall sound like fairytales. In the course of time, a concrete
historical event sinks into history and assumes increasingly
mythical features. The nebulous and none too appropriate term "Fall
of the Wall" has become established, and yet it shifts the events
into the realm of the unreal. Did it fall, or was it pushed?
Certainly the term no longer seems to envisage an actively defiant
subject.

What a strange, unimaginable world: a city divided by a wall.
Part of the stock in trade of mythical figures are people shot while
trying to escape across the border, the dancers on the wall, the
"wall-peckers" who caused the concrete to crumble, and the
stammering GDR delegate who had to somehow read the news about the
opening of the border from a piece of paper, as if unable to fully
comprehend what was actually happening. The political scientist
Herfried Mnkler, who has just been awarded the Prize of the Leipzig
Book Fair for his Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen (The Germans and
their Myths), laments that since its foundation in 1949 the Federal
Republic has had no major myth to which it might have referred and
which might have shaped its identity. For the new Germany, the fall
of the Wall could close that gap. And literature, that great story-
teller, has an important role to play here.

For years, people in the culture sections of newspaper and
magazines have been waiting impatiently for the "great novel of the
transition era". Yet regardless of how often books were published
under that label, the waiting continued. And quite a number of
books, such as Annett Grschner"s Moskauer Eis (Moscow Ice),
Christoph Hein's Landnahme (Land Seizure), Kurt Drawert's
Spiegelland (Land of Mirrors) or Jens Sparschuh's
Zimmerspringbrunnen (Indoor Fountain), were not even recognized as
such. Now however, over the past four or five years, that sense of
expectation has eased somewhat, so that literature finally has the
air that it needs in order to breathe. Meanwhile a whole series of
books have appeared that deal quite naturally with 1989 and its
consequences, without also having to be the great novel of the
transition: Julia Schoch's short work Mit der Geschwindigkeit des
Sommers (With the Speed of Summer) might be mentioned first - a
requiem to the GDR, focusing on a small town in Mecklenburg once
dominated by the troops of the National Peoplexs Army, where the
narrator's sister once loved a soldier. …

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